Images by Kasey and Ben Photography

This summer Peninsula School of Art and Peninsula State Park partnered to offer a residency experience that puts both art making and the environment at its center. Inaugural artists Maysey Craddock and Tomiko Jones were invited to explore the state park through the lens of their individual research; discovering new connections in their practices, creating site-responsive works, and gaining a deeper understanding of this particular place and its environmental circumstances. The residency experience culminates in the exhibition Of Place, curated by Shan Bryan-Hanson, featuring work created by Maysey Craddock and Tomiko Jones prior to and during their residency sessions.

 Curator’s Statement

Of Place is the culmination of the inaugural Peninsula State Park Artist-in-Residence program, co-sponsored by the Peninsula School of Art and Friends of Peninsula State Park. During the residency, Massey Craddock and Tomiko Jones each created several new works of art, exhibited here in context with pieces from their larger bodies of work.

Maysey Craddock’s paintings on stitched paper bags depict images that draw our attention to the nuanced shapes of tree branches, plant forms, and other intimate details unique to a specific place. She pulls us into the work not by painting distant trees in vast landscapes, but rather by bringing the foliage into the foreground, allowing its presence to fill the picture plane. Her mesmerizing use of color and contrast creates immersive painted worlds: microecosystems that reference the Anthropocene, disappearing wetlands, elegy and entropy.

Craddock’s process involves layers of mediation, from disassembling and reassembling the found paper bags on which she paints to using technology to alter photographic images that are then drawn and painted on the sewn together paper bags. In many ways, the organic and evolving nature of this process reflects the changing landscapes she depicts, the way land is altered by human activity and encroachment.

Tomiko Jones uses the cyanotype process as a means of memorial, to bring attention not only to absence but also to presence, not so much to what remains as to what is. So much of Jones’ work explores loss, both individual and cultural. It’s hard to look at her work and not consider the impact of human carelessness and cruelty. Through the cyanotype process which she has referred to as “a collaboration with sun, wind, and water” she tenderly memorializes animals forgotten or left behind.

Immersed in ritual, her art presents an unhurried way of being in a “grand place,” an antidote to the typical checklist of sites to see. She enters the public lands she visits with an openness that allows her art to unfold over time. She begins with questions rather than answers, and the results are intimate and thought-provoking. The deep care with which she approaches her subjects is palpable, focusing attention on that which is ephemeral and temporal.

Craddock and Jones create art that brings awareness to climate change and related humanitarian crises of our time, and yet they don’t prescribe solutions or posit answers. Rather, they guide us gently to see, to open our eyes, and carefully consider what is before us.

Shan Bryan-Hanson, Curator